Recently, the high development in information related industry and the trend in pursuit of speed, a variety of electronic and information products have been presented, and the existing products have also been reconditioned or renewed, for dazzling men. For the industry, it is unavoidable to perform various tests on samples with different specifications to verify whether the operation of the design is correct or not. Therefore, the quality control and test for several products has become a significant issue in industry.
In the past, the development process, from design, through manufacture, and up to verification, for a new type of product performed by chip designers and manufactures is essentially shown as FIG. 1. First, the design for the chip is completed 101. The completed chip design is then tested under the simulation environment to check whether the chip design will react properly on various commands 103. Only after having been confirmed, is engineering sample production for the chip 105 allowed. After fabrication of the chip, for the purpose of performance testing, it is then necessary to prepare a corresponding main board for supporting the chip 107, to assemble a computer including the chip therein 109, install the operating system of the computer and software used for testing 111, and finally to perform an on-board test and analysis for the chip 113. The chip may be put into market formally in the event of passing the test; otherwise, a modification to the chip design is necessary.
In general, most errors in the logical circuit of the product design may be found and then corrected after the simulation verification process and a series of tests in the process 101, have been completed. However, with the chip installed on the main board, there are possibly still some potential errors that may occur at the regular operation, such as a wrong setting with respect to the configuration space, and the like, etc.
In the conventional art, the completed chip is first installed on the main board and the power on self test (POST) runs. Subsequently, the basic input/output system (BIOS) is loaded and then the chip is initialized. After the data and initial values of the chip setting in the chip configuration space have been read, the operating system is loaded for normal start.
During the aforementioned start process, the chip is initialized without verifying its configuration settings. At this moment, the operation of the chip may be different from the presetting target, resulting in abnormal operation, in the event of that wrong configuration setting of the chip occurs.
Moreover, the initial values may be set under the assumption that the configuration space settings of the chip are correct. It is hard to trace the source problem once the chip experiences problem due to the wrong configuration setting. As a result, repeated and complex precision testing is necessary for finding out where the key problem is. Therefore, a waste of time and labor, increased manufacturing cost, reduced product competition, and resistance for the development of new generation products may be encountered.
Thus, what is desired by users and intended to be solved by the present invention for a long time is proposing a novel solution, designing a test method with high efficiency for not only testing the configuration setting of the chip, but also testing before the chip is placed on the main board for operating actually, in order to examine the actual operation of the chip, aiming at the disadvantages in the manufacture and test process for the aforementioned conventional chip. Actual experiences, in related research, development, and sale, in the information industry are the basis of the present invention for the improvement. With several designs, studies, samples, and improvements, a method for testing chip configuration settings is thus invented for solving above problems.